The science of choking under pressure

Tyler Bass, "wide right", and faltering in the clutch

Hi everyone,

I’m sorry for starting off on such a down note. But I did say in this newsletter I’d be discussing how great skill arises — and how it can occasionally crumble. In this case, we’re going to talk about the latter.

Tyler Bass is a good kicker. Not a once-in-a-generation kicker, but a steady kicker, a reliable kicker, a kicker who earns $5.1 million a year to be a kicker, a kicker who has performed in big games, including the playoffs. He’s no slouch.

And we know kickers aren’t perfect. They’re streaky, and generally extraordinarily superstitious. Weather factors greatly in their performance, and the wind was howling in Buffalo last Sunday. Sometimes there are even mystical influencers, like the spectral burden of a missed kick in the Super Bowl 33 years ago that still haunts the franchise.

Ok … So why did Tyler Bass choke?

There’s been a gargantuan amount of research (roughly 13,000 papers, and counting) exploring why skilled performers slip up, gag, or fold in critical moments. The interest in understanding “choking” extends well beyond sports and into entertainment, politics, business, law enforcement — anywhere that anxiety might creep its insidious tendrils into a heavily practiced task.

The bulk of the research says that choking has to do with attentional overload.

It’s coming down to the game’s final moments, you’re aware that everyone is watching you — and suddenly you’ve been tossed out of the flow of the action. You’re more self-conscious about each and every movement you make. Physiologically, stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline get released into your bloodstream, elevating your breathing and heart rate, triggering fountains of sweat. Psychologically, self-consciousness disrupts the automatic sequences of the action that you’ve been training and practicing. It forces you to think through the steps of an action that was heretofore thoughtless. You, an expert, might even regress to a novice-like behavior in the middle of a choking event. (It’s been shown to happen)

Grabbing the wheel when you’ve been on autopilot sounds wise, but it can be fatal in performance. Certain sequences are practiced so rigorously they are supposed to be automatic — the backswing on a golf putt, the release on a football throw, the flip in a gymnast’s routine. Adding attentional focus to such sequences gums up the works. It’s paralysis by analysis.

That’s the crux of the well-worn theory on choking, anyway, in a nut shell. But it still leaves a lot to be desired.

One of the lingering questions gnawing at the foundation of this theory is why do only some performers choke and not others? Surely, all athletes feel pressure at times, but not every one of them exhibits that debilitating self-consciousness that causes skills to crumble. Most studies on this subject have looked at large groups of chokers vs. non-chokers, but this isn’t how real-world choking usually occurs. It’s usually one poor soul botching things up for everyone else.

Recent research has looked more closely at what personality traits might make someone more “choking-susceptible.”

Among the findings are support that self-consciousness, trait anxiety, fear of negative evaluation (FNE), fear of failure (FOF), perfectionism, and narcissism can be characteristics of choking-susceptible athletes, and in some cases even predictive of an impending choke job.

You may notice in that list the repetition of a single word: fear. A 2011 study by Christopher Mesagno and Jack Harvey at the University of Ballarat, in Australia, and Christopher Janelle at the University of Florida looked at expert field-hockey players performing penalty shots in pressure conditions. Some players were told they would earn cash if they scored well. Others were told to shoot with a live recording video camera within their peripheral vision. Another group was told that footage of the session would be shown to their coach. A fourth group had to take shots in front of fans. Finally, a fifth group was asked to perform for monetary incentives, a live camera, and an audience.

Which group do you suppose struggled the most?

It wasn’t the money. It wasn’t the camera. It wasn’t the audience. It wasn’t even all three combined.

It was the implication that the performance would be recorded and presented to her coach that produced the clearest evidence of choking under pressure. A fear of negative evaluation (or fear of failure) causes the initial anxiety increase that disrupts the automaticity of performance.

So just don’t think about what your coach thinks. Got it. That it?

Not exactly. I want to bring to your attention another recent study that wasn’t specifically about choking, but I do think it was fairly instructive about what great performers can do in tense moments.

During the Olympic Games in Tokyo, in 2021, the World Archery Federation, in collaboration with Panasonic, actually measured the heart rates of competitors in real time using remote high-speed cameras that can detect skin reflectance. The accuracy of the cameras is said to be around 96 percent, in line with a pulse oximeter or EKG.

If you happened to be watching the archery competition on television, you would’ve seen those heart rates from 122 male and female archers broadcast on the screen along with every shot. Pretty amazing technology. But if you missed it (as most of us did), fortunately a group of researchers from Singapore and Nanjing University tallied up all those heart-rate readings (2,247 of them) and organized them in a nifty little presentation published last year in Psychological Science.

Lo and behold, archers whose heart rates were higher before taking a shot consistently fared worse in the results. The findings were so clear that the researchers could predict the results of the match simply by heart-rate readings. And athletes grew increasingly stressed and performed worse as the matches came closer to finishing, suggesting that their pressure to perform was outweighing whatever mindfulness training they’d been attempting. But, again, those athletes who could keep their heart rates lower wound up shooting better. While these results aren’t necessarily surprising, it’s amazing insight into the literal heart-pounding action within a heart-pounding competition.

I get it, no one chokes when they’re practicing at home in front of the mirror. But performance usually requires acting in front of an audience, expecting some judgment. Is there anything that can be done to keep this anxiety at bay?

Yes! Fortunately, Mesagno has some advice for overcoming choking-susceptibility. In a 2017 review article on choking studies, he wrote that unilateral hand contractions — simply via clenching your left fist rapidly for a few moments — can “prime the visuospatial processes” of the right brain for necessary motor actions and suppress the analytical processes of the left brain that may overstep when the pressure is on.

In other words, clenching your left fist before an action tells your brain to stop thinking about it and just do it.

In five studies on left-hand contractions, researchers found that skilled athletes who squeezed a soft ball in their left hand for 30 seconds prior to performing under pressure handled their tasks without any defects. As for the control group, which squeezed the ball with their right hand? Yep. Chokers.

Try it next time before you’re about to tee off at a member-guest or serve for the match in the local pickleball tournament or kick a FG to tie a game in the NFL playoffs. Squeeze your left fist repeatedly for about 30 seconds. See if it helps keep your self-consciousness at bay.

Links

Study: Can ChatGPT replace running coaches? … “Women are in pain and not saying anything because they're happy getting a free pair of boots [from commercial sponsors], but that isn't aiding bodies or performance.” … New research found a significant increase in the rate of abdominal, groin, hip, and hamstring injuries during the 2020 NFL season compared to previous seasons. … “We can’t predict success,” admits CEO of a cognitive evaluation company that told NFL teams it could predict which QBs to draft … Recaro’s new seat tech adds track feel to racing sims … Teenage darts phenom astounds as runner-up in world championship … “consistency is key to Morgan's strong heart, stating that the 93-year-old exercises for about 40 minutes per day, while his diet is also "extremely consistent" and high in protein.” 

References

Mesagno, Christopher, Jack T. Harvey, and Christopher M. Janelle. "Self-presentation origins of choking: Evidence from separate pressure manipulations." Journal of sport and exercise psychology 33.3 (2011): 441-459.

Peter Gröpel & Christopher Mesagno (2019) Choking interventions in sports: A systematic review, International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 12:1, 176-201, DOI: 10.1080/1750984X.2017.1408134

Lu, Y., & Zhong, S. (2023). Contactless Real-Time Heart Rate Predicts the Performance of Elite Athletes: Evidence From Tokyo 2020 Olympic Archery Competition. Psychological Science, 34(3), 384-393